The other day I blogged the words of St John of Damascus who wrote...

I may not have many books, nor much time to read, but, strangled with thoughts, as if with thorns, I come into the common surgery of the soul, the church; the luster of the painting draws me to vision and delights my sight like a meadow and imperceptibly introduces my soul to the glory of God.

I said that it's a good job he didn't live around here because in my view, there is a clear and definite link between the lack of beauty in our Churches and the lack of people. Fr Massie responded to ask "In that case, why aren't most Anglican churches bursting at the seams?"

It's a reasonable question, so I gave him an unreasonable answer and then thought better of it and decided I should probably write this blog entry...

The words of St John of Damascus put me in mind of a passage from GK Chesterton in which he discusses the difficulty most people have in understanding the rational compared with the ease with which they understand the mystical...

...to judge of the aims of a thing like the Salvation Army is very difficult, to judge of their ritual and atmosphere very easy. No one, perhaps, but a sociologist can see whether General Booth’s housing scheme is right. But any healthy person can see that banging brass cymbals together must be right. A page of statistics, a plan of model dwellings, anything which is rational, is always difficult for the lay mind. But the thing which is irrational any one can understand. That is why religion came so early into the world and spread so far, while science came so late into the world and has not spread at all. History unanimously attests the fact that it is only mysticism which stands the smallest chance of being understanded of the people.

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For example, it would take me a very long time to explain to my two year old daughter that it is a very difficult thing to build a huge Cathedral because it requires many people to spend a lot of time planning, understanding physics and architecture, carving stone and so on. At the end when I told her that such things exist she would probably yawn and as me to let her watch a Pingu DVD. She would not be terribly impressed.

But when we went to Beverley and walked around the corner and the great Minster loomed in the sky above her, two towering pillars of golden sandstone in the crisp autumn sun, she stopped in her tracks and said "wow".

Forgive me if I bold my own paragraph but this is important...

Despite the fact that the modernist liberal church prides itself on having broken free of the tedious dry dogma of the past it has in fact achieved the very opposite. It is now in fact, almost impossible to wander in off the street in the middle of a Catholic Mass and say, with all the wisdom of a two year old, "wow".

In order to have a sense of wonder at the Mass now we must go the intellectual route, it is all they have left us. St John of Damascus was without many books but before we can see anything special about the elderly gentleman with the bread and wine we must read many books, listen to talks, go on courses and study our Bible. You will point out that most people don't do that sort of thing, I will point out that most people are not saying "wow" to the Mass.

Trying to get young people to be impressed at the Mass is like trying to get them to be impressed at the technology inside a laptop computer. The fact that entire libraries of information can be stored in a space the size of a pen lid is hardly impressive because it just works. We have done something similar with the Eucharist, we have placed it inside a plastic case and made it a simple matter of pushing a button.

Our liturgy is as impressive to the untrained eye as a beige box with a whirring fan and a small group of excited nerds crowded around it crowing about how much RAM it has.

If the Church is ever to grow beyond a small band of nerdy bookish people it is vital that we re-learn how to speak the language of the soul. We need to make it clear at first sight that this is a thing that is special, holy, important and impressive. It is not enough for the computer scientists to understand that the modern microchip is a marvel of engineering, it is not enough for the theologians to be impressed at the symbolism in the way they have laid the chairs out in a half circle...

This is why things like art and incense, vestments and kneeling are so important, because you don't need to be a technical person to understand.

I am reminded of the time we went with young people to visit the Church with the frescoes in Pickering and more than one of them said "why isn't our Church like that?" Any healthy person can see that a 20ft high painting of St George slaying the dragon must be right. It takes a special kind of madness to think a clever abstract painting that has to be explained is preferable.

So when I say there is a link between the lack of beauty in our churches and the lack of people - this is what I am getting at. We have removed the things that are obviously good and right and left something that only those who are already "in" (or willing to make the effort) can begin to look at and say "this is important", "this means something".

Not long ago on this blog I bemoaned the lack of incense on Christmas day and somebody said in the comments...

Whatever happens in your parish and however discouraged you may be remember the incense is a symbol but Our Lord in the Eucharist is real, despite the faith of the priest confector.

I know that and you know that but unless the signs and symbols and trappings scream out "this is the most important thing in the world" it is unlikely that the bloke down the road who didn't learn to read properly at school and now sits at home all day playing on his PS3 is ever going to work it out.

Another beautiful picture from the LION & the CARDINAL.

St. John of Damascus writes...

I may not have many books, nor much time to read, but, strangled with thoughts, as if with thorns, I come into the common surgery of the soul, the church; the luster of the painting draws me to vision and delights my sight like a meadow and imperceptibly introduces my soul to the glory of God. I have seen the perseverance of the martyr, the recompense of the crowns, and as if by fire I am eagerly kindled to zeal, and falling down I venerate God through the martyr and I receive salvation.

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Good job he didn't live around here...

Joking aside, there is a clear and definite link between the lack of beauty in our Churches and the lack of people.

If you like wierd and wonderful old stuff, then you might like The LION & the CARDINAL which is a blog consisting mainly of nice photos of beautiful and interesting things.

We really liked this scene from an early 13th century spanish manuscript...

We think it would work very well as a new reredos for Middlesbrough Catherdal...

Any chance of having it in before St Therese gets here?

Don't forget to look at my other alternative suggestions for Middlesbrough Cathedral reredos.

This is what technology was made for...

[h/t Hacked Gadgets]

One day when the kids are older I want to do this...

They built a model of Rome, in a day, in chronological order... Volunteers construct the buildings out of cardboard and wood.

We're going 1.238 years per minute, which means...it's approximate. I have a timeline that has all of the buildings in order and all of the times that they're meant to be dedicated. I try to get someone started on a given building that's coming up, so that it will be completed roughly in order and on time. It doesn't work completely, but it works pretty well—to give you a sense of it. But there are times, like during the Republican Period, when the Punic Wars are happening, and such, there are a lot of foreign conquests going on, so not a lot of building is happening. And we talk about that in the space. We kind of mention it and say, sorry, we don't have a lot to build right now because this is where the energy's going.

But then during the era of Augustus, there's a lot that gets built—and a lot of the buildings get renovated as well. So we usually manage to get a little bit off track around then, which at that point in the project is about 9:00 in the morning, and everyone's on the ground building different things. Some of the things you're putting up become a little sloppier because you're trying to get all the buildings up in some form. And, of course, a number of them are renovated or they're destroyed by fire. But then we'll renovate them and add paint or...we switched—we used cardboard as an analog to brick and wood as an analog to marble. The saying is, Augustus found a city of brick and left it a city of marble, and so we try to switch to wood at that point. That's when the empire really comes into being.

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I just noticed they used 120 volunteers... We're going to need a few more kids!

When I were a lad... that is, when I was a young warthog. I was a nerd. I wouldn't have put myself in the athiest box but my grasp of metaphysics was, well, not what you might call a grasp.

I didn't have much time for the artistic side of things. I liked computers and was interested in physics. My ain problem with art was the inability to objectivly measure things. As far as I was concerned a picture was a picture is a picture. Some pictures are better than others but only in so far as they more accurately represent whatever it is they are a picture of.

This isn't true.

For years I performed that perculiarly human trick of carrying around two contradicting thoughts in my head at the same time. On the one hand, I felt that the quality of art was only to be measured by how accurately it depicted it's object. On the other hand I recognised that objects themselves (especially girls) could be beautiful in their own right. A piece of art, being an object, could be beautiful in it's own right.

This gave me a problem. I couldn't work out how, in the physical world, one could take account of beauty. Why does the view over a lake from halfway up a mountain on a winters day look really beautiful but the view of a cup of tea though often welcome just doesn't evoke the same response. I wondered if experiments could be conducted to mathematically determine what made something beautiful. I tried drawing several random squiggles on a sheet of paper and then selecting my favourite, what made it my favourite. I discovered that cleverer folk than myself had discovered 1.618.

Phi didn't satisfy though and my quest continued. I realised (though I didn't know the word 'subjective' on those days) that beauty may or may not be be subjective. On the one hand, what is beautiful to one may not be beautiful to another. However, people who don't think Ella is beautiful are wrong. I'll have none of this 'Ella is beautiful to you but not to me' rubbish. The beauty of Ella is an objective truth.

Either beauty only seems objective but it is in fact 'in the eye of the beholder' or beauty is objective and not everyone is always very good at spotting it. I expect it's a bit of both and I'm going to place this question in the 'mystery' box and get on with my life.

I am still left with a problem. The entire world has gone mad (original sin dontchaknow) and has started building things like this instead of things like this. The music in our churches is almost universally mediocre (I can say that, I play some of it). The art is generally poor. People say they like it. People say they are glad to be out of the stuffy old church and in to the modern new one. I have seen a lot of old churches and I can say one thing for certain, stuffiness decreases with age. Nobody can accuse St. Charles, Hull or St. Peters, Rome of stuffiness.

God gave us the gift of creation. This is ultimately fulfilled when we produce children in marriage but that is not the only way we create. We create when we draw, paint, sculpt, design buildings or play musical instruments. When man uses his gift of creation he gives glory to God. That's why I consider it to be very dubious indeed when digital electronics is used to produce the music at mass.

I have digressed. This was going to be a post about wood carving. So much for that. The long and the short of it is that I think wood is beautiful and wood carvings are great and I am going to/have been trying to learn how to do them. I have also been learning to draw.

Look at the time I have to go...